Rock Bands, Artists and Cyberhybrids at PHDays V

PHDays, an international forum on practical security held on May 26-27, continues to attract an ever increasing audience including many from the arts including musicians, artists, retrofuturists, and writers. PHDays is not just a technical event but one that encompassed the culture associated with the cyber community. Our non-technical program includes our first cyberpunk short story competition.

Six Million Characters of Cyberpunk

There have been more than 200 short stories sent for the Hacked Future contest. Indeed, some of them were much longer than the required 30,000 characters. Thanks a lot! We have now sorted through all the entries and have. cut the long list down to just 53 short stories that are now being studied by the expert panel — participants of the MDS project Vladislav Kopp and Sergey Chekmaev, the director of the Snowball publishing house Gleb Gusakov, and the author Alexey Andreev who also writes under the pen name of Mercy Shelley. The short listed stories will be translated into English and judged by the chairman of the competition — Bruce Sterling, one of the fathers of the cyberpunk genre. The winners will be announced at 19:30 on May 26 at the Positive Hack Days V venue. Right after that, the MDS team will announce the complete shortlist to all the conference participants.

Brontosaurus at the Bus Station

Positive Hack Days V is hosting an exhibition of artwork by Alexey Andreev. Hailing from Saint-Petersburg, Andreev will share his vision of the future in Digital Painting technique.

Andreev invites us to take a journey into the dark side of the human consciousness where his characters are born. He brings us to a world of recognizable reality but with such eccentric characters and incredible events it is inevitable that the ordinary man finds himself in a chaotic or twisted version of his own world. The draw of his creations is that they’re almost believable, as opposed to complete fiction, but at the same time they’re twisted into an alternative reality.

Andreev’s projects include working on the animated version of the legendary film Kin-dza-dza! under the direction of Georgiy Daneliya and forum participants will have an opportunity to speak with the artist as well as purchase his paintings. Additionally, we are also exhibiting the work of a number of techno-artistic hybrid artists. There will be antique robots, walls that transfer information by air, and other surprising art objects, part of which has been made by real hackers from among the forum coordinators.

Great Music

In addition to a full forum program there will also be rock concerts held each evening right after the technical program closes for the day. The first evening we have, Pochemu Ya Ne Stal Kosmonavtom (lit. "why haven't I become a cosmonaut") performing for us. Formed in 2012,hey have performed live on radio including "Mayak" and "Vesna FM". The band's motto — “To infinity and beyond”.

On May 27, you can enjoy Britpop and indie rock by YesYes! . YesYes have performed at over 100 concerts to audiences for over the last two years and were a finalist in a prestigious Rolling Stone Magazine band competition. Their single "You'd better" came first at the international Global Rockstar competition (the "song of the week" nomination). The band's tracks have been included on the soundtrack to the first Russian film about international downhill races — "Vibiraya Put" (lit. "choosing the way").

"We're delighted to be playing at this forum. As well as performing our previous hits we have also prepared something special to play for you — our new single. We’ve been working on it over the last couple of months in preparation for our album release," says Sergey, the band's frontman.

3,000 hackers, IS experts, IT businessmen, researchers, government representatives, and digital freedom activists will gather at PHDays V on May 26-27. Why not join us? The venue is the World Trade Center: Krasnopresnenskaya nab. 12, Moscow. You can purchase tickets at runet-id.com/event/phdays15/